Jennifer Roberson: Sword Born

Yet despite the price it had been easy to break them, because it was for Delilah. For her oaths and honor.

And so in the South, my homeland, I was prey to be hunted by any sword-dancer alive, to be killed without honor outside of the circle because I wasn’t part of it any more. In the North, Del’s homeland, I was a man who had turned his back on the glory of Staal-Ysta, the Place of Swords, and the sword-singers who danced in the circle with enchanted blades.

But here, now, with her, I was just me. Sometimes, that’s enough.

We left the North because Del agreed to go, if only because I forced her hand by winning a dance in the circle according to Northern rites. But I’d forced their hands, too, those blond and bitter people who’d sooner see Delilah dead even by deception because of broken oaths; once healed, once reunited, once free of Staal-Ysta and Dragon Mountain with its demon-made hounds of hoolies, we had eventually headed South — where within a year I’d broken the oaths I’d sworn to my people.

Now both of us were nameless, homeless, lacking songs and honor, abandoning our pasts in the search for a new present, but one linked uncannily to a past older than either of us knew: a baby’s begetting, a boy’s birth. The woman who had whelped me there on the Punja’s crystal sands, and the man who had sired me far away in foreign lands.

Skandi. Or so we thought. So Del thought, and declared; I was less certain. She said it was only because I was a self-made man and didn’t want to know the truth of my presence in the world, for fear I was lesser or greater than what I’d become.

Me, I said little enough about it. Mild curiosity and the dictates of the moment — the need to retreat, rethink, escape — had been diluted beneath the uncertainties of sailing, of odd, misplaced regrets, and something akin to confusion. Even homesickness. Except it was all very complicated, that. Because the South maybe wasn’t my home at all. My birthplace, yes. That much I knew. Southron-born, Southron-reared. But not, we now believed, Southron-begotten. Which is one of the reasons we were on this thrice-cursed boat, sailing to a place where I could have been conceived.

Or not.

Someone might have told me, once. Sula. A woman of the tribes, of the Salset, who’d done more than any to make me a man in all the ways one can be. While the rest of the Salset ridiculed me as a chula, a slave, as an over-tall, long-limbed, big-boned boy awkward in body, in mind, wholly ignorant of grace, Sula had valued me. In her bed, to start with. Later, in her heart.

Mother. Sister. Lover. Wife. Yet neither bound by blood, rites, or ritual beyond the one we made at night, when I was allowed to sleep somewhere other than on a filthy, odorous goatskin flung down upon Punja sand. But Sula was dead of a demon in her breast, and there was no one to tell me now.

We left, too, because I was, well, a messiah. Or so some people believed. Others, of course, didn’t buy any of it. People are funny that way. Some believe because of faith, needing no evidence; others have faith only in evidence — and I had not, apparently, offered any of worth.

At least, not the kind they believed in. After all, turning the sand to grass — or so the legendary prophecy went — was not the kind of imagery that really grabs a man, especially Southroners. It was a little too, I don’t know, pastoral for them, who suckled sand with their mother’s milk.

Whether I was the messiah, called jhihadi, and whether I had turned the sand to grass (or at least begun the process), was open to debate. Both were possible, I’d decided in a fit of self-aggrandizement fostered by too much aqivi and too little of, well, Del’s admiration and affection one night beneath the moon, if one took the magic out of it and depended on a literal faith.

That’s always a problem, dealing with religion. People take imagery literally. Or when the truth is presented as something unutterably tedious — such as digging canals and ditches to channel water from places with it to places without it — no one wants to listen. It’s not flowery enough. Not magical enough.

Hoolies, but I hate magic. Even when I work it myself.

Having established once again that my bunk was not a particularly promising location for assignations of admiration and affection — I nearly smacked my head again, while Del cracked an elbow hard enough to provoke a string of hissed and dramatic invective (in uplander, which saved my tender ears) — we eventually wandered up onto the deck to greet the morning with something less than enthusiasm, and to placate discontented bellies with the sailor’s bounty the crew called hardtack. Hard it was; anyone lacking teeth would starve to death. Fortunately neither Del nor I did, so we managed to gag it down with a few swallows of tepid water (Del) or a belly-burning liquor called rhuum (me). Then we stood at the rail and stared in morosely thoughtful silence at the wind-rumpled water, wondering when (or if) we’d ever see land again. It had been two days since we’d left behind a string of small islands where we’d stopped long enough to take on fresh water and fruit.

"Maybe it’s not a real place," I observed, only half-serious, which, as usual with Del, provoked a literal response.

"What — Skandi? Of course it’s a real place. Or they wouldn’t have taken us on as passengers."

I slanted her a glance. Del couldn’t possibly be any part of serious. "Are you any part of serious?"

"I didn’t ask about Skandi in particular." She dismissed without rancor my unspoken suggestion that someone, somewhere, had done the impossible and taken advantage of Delilah. "I asked where the ships were going. Nothing more. So no, I did not play us into someone’s greedy hands by planting the idea we’d go anywhere so long as we thought it was Skandi. They told me this one was going there, without prompting."

I vividly recalled the day she’d have scoured and scaled me with tongue and temper for even hinting someone had gotten the best of her. But the bascha had settled somewhat in the past three years, thanks to my benign influence. Now she explained.

Grinning, I settled once again against the rail. It creaked and gave. I moved off it again, promptly, scowling at damp, stained, salt-crusted wood. The ocean troughs were deepening, smacking unruly waves against the prow. So much water out there… and so little of anything else. Like — land. "You know, I just can’t see how a pregnant woman would sail all the way to the South from a place so far away just to have a baby."

"Maybe she didn’t."

"Didn’t?"

"Well, maybe she didn’t leave Skandi to have her baby in the South. Maybe she got pregnant on the voyage. Or maybe she got pregnant after she reached the South." Del eyed me assessively. "After all, half of you could be Southron. You look like a Borderer."

I’d heard that before, from others. I wasn’t right for pure Southron blood, because the desert men were small, neat, and trim, dark-eyed, and swarthier than I. By the same token, I was too dark for a Northerner, who were routinely much fairer of hair than my bronze-brown. I was somewhere in the middle: tall and big-boned as Del’s people, but much darker in skin and hair; too big, but not dark enough for a Southroner, and green-eyed to boot. Borderers, however, were halfbreeds, born primarily to folk who lived either side of the border between the North and the South. It made perfect sense that I was a Borderer. Which meant I wasn’t Skandic at all, and this entire voyage of discovery was sheer folly.

But a man in Julah, where Del and I had stopped before going over-mountain to Haziz-by-the-ocean-sea, had thought I was of his people. Had spoken to me in his tongue. And he was Skandic. Or so he seemed, and so Del believed; she’d sworn he looked enough like me to be my brother. Which was possible — if I was Skandic, and he was — if not probable when considering the odds. Still, it was better odds than I’d been offered before beyond a dance in the circle — which I couldn’t do anymore, thanks to me breaking the oaths and codes of Alimat. And departing the South altogether. It was as good an excuse as any to leave a place where men who’d trained as I had, where men as good as I was, were hunting my head.